Agents
Identifying Time-varying Costs in Finite-horizon Linear Quadratic Gaussian Games
We address cost identification in a finite-horizon linear quadratic Gaussian game. We characterize the set of cost parameters that generate a given Nash equilibrium policy. We propose a backpropagation algorithm to identify the time-varying cost parameters. We derive a probabilistic error bound when the cost parameters are identified from finite trajectories. We test our method in numerical and driving simulations. Our algorithm identifies the cost parameters that can reproduce the Nash equilibrium policy and trajectory observations.
Beyond Accuracy: A Multi-Dimensional Framework for Evaluating Enterprise Agentic AI Systems
Current agentic AI benchmarks predominantly evaluate task completion accuracy, while overlooking critical enterprise requirements such as cost-efficiency, reliability, and operational stability. Through systematic analysis of 12 main benchmarks and empirical evaluation of state-of-the-art agents, we identify three fundamental limitations: (1) absence of cost-controlled evaluation leading to 50x cost variations for similar precision, (2) inadequate reliability assessment where agent performance drops from 60\% (single run) to 25\% (8-run consistency), and (3) missing multidimensional metrics for security, latency, and policy compliance. We propose \textbf{CLEAR} (Cost, Latency, Efficacy, Assurance, Reliability), a holistic evaluation framework specifically designed for enterprise deployment. Evaluation of six leading agents on 300 enterprise tasks demonstrates that optimizing for accuracy alone yields agents 4.4-10.8x more expensive than cost-aware alternatives with comparable performance. Expert evaluation (N=15) confirms that CLEAR better predicts production success (correlation $ฯ=0.83$) compared to accuracy-only evaluation ($ฯ=0.41$).
Fair-GNE : Generalized Nash Equilibrium-Seeking Fairness in Multiagent Healthcare Automation
Ekpo, Promise, Agarwal, Saesha, Grimm, Felix, Molu, Lekan, Taylor, Angelique
Enforcing a fair workload allocation among multiple agents tasked to achieve an objective in learning enabled demand side healthcare worker settings is crucial for consistent and reliable performance at runtime. Existing multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) approaches steer fairness by shaping reward through post hoc orchestrations, leaving no certifiable self-enforceable fairness that is immutable by individual agents at runtime. Contextualized within a setting where each agent shares resources with others, we address this shortcoming with a learning enabled optimization scheme among self-interested decision makers whose individual actions affect those of other agents. This extends the problem to a generalized Nash equilibrium (GNE) game-theoretic framework where we steer group policy to a safe and locally efficient equilibrium, so that no agent can improve its utility function by unilaterally changing its decisions. Fair-GNE models MARL as a constrained generalized Nash equilibrium-seeking (GNE) game, prescribing an ideal equitable collective equilibrium within the problem's natural fabric. Our hypothesis is rigorously evaluated in our custom-designed high-fidelity resuscitation simulator. Across all our numerical experiments, Fair-GNE achieves significant improvement in workload balance over fixed-penalty baselines (0.89 vs.\ 0.33 JFI, $p < 0.01$) while maintaining 86\% task success, demonstrating statistically significant fairness gains through adaptive constraint enforcement. Our results communicate our formulations, evaluation metrics, and equilibrium-seeking innovations in large multi-agent learning-based healthcare systems with clarity and principled fairness enforcement.
APD-Agents: A Large Language Model-Driven Multi-Agents Collaborative Framework for Automated Page Design
Chen, Xinpeng, Han, Xiaofeng, Zhang, Kaihao, Ren, Guochao, Wang, Yujie, Cao, Wenhao, Zhou, Yang, Lu, Jianfeng, Song, Zhenbo
Layout design is a crucial step in developing mobile app pages. However, crafting satisfactory designs is time-intensive for designers: they need to consider which controls and content to present on the page, and then repeatedly adjust their size, position, and style for better aesthetics and structure. Although many design software can now help to perform these repetitive tasks, extensive training is needed to use them effectively. Moreover, collaborative design across app pages demands extra time to align standards and ensure consistent styling. In this work, we propose APD-agents, a large language model (LLM) driven multi-agent framework for automated page design in mobile applications. Our framework contains OrchestratorAgent, SemanticParserAgent, PrimaryLayoutAgent, TemplateRetrievalAgent, and RecursiveComponentAgent. Upon receiving the user's description of the page, the OrchestratorAgent can dynamically can direct other agents to accomplish users' design task. To be specific, the SemanticParserAgent is responsible for converting users' descriptions of page content into structured data. The PrimaryLayoutAgent can generate an initial coarse-grained layout of this page. The TemplateRetrievalAgent can fetch semantically relevant few-shot examples and enhance the quality of layout generation. Besides, a RecursiveComponentAgent can be used to decide how to recursively generate all the fine-grained sub-elements it contains for each element in the layout. Our work fully leverages the automatic collaboration capabilities of large-model-driven multi-agent systems. Experimental results on the RICO dataset show that our APD-agents achieve state-of-the-art performance.
Collaborative QA using Interacting LLMs. Impact of Network Structure, Node Capability and Distributed Data
Jain, Adit, Krishnamurthy, Vikram, Zhang, Yiming
In this paper, we model and analyze how a network of interacting LLMs performs collaborative question-answering (CQA) in order to estimate a ground truth given a distributed set of documents. This problem is interesting because LLMs often hallucinate when direct evidence to answer a question is lacking, and these effects become more pronounced in a network of interacting LLMs. The hallucination spreads, causing previously accurate LLMs to hallucinate. We study interacting LLMs and their hallucination by combining novel ideas of mean-field dynamics (MFD) from network science and the randomized utility model from economics to construct a useful generative model. We model the LLM with a latent state that indicates if it is truthful or not with respect to the ground truth, and extend a tractable analytical model considering an MFD to model the diffusion of information in a directed network of LLMs. To specify the probabilities that govern the dynamics of the MFD, we propose a randomized utility model. For a network of LLMs, where each LLM has two possible latent states, we posit sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of a fixed point and analyze the behavior of the fixed point in terms of the incentive (e.g., test-time compute) given to individual LLMs. We experimentally study and analyze the behavior of a network of $100$ open-source LLMs with respect to data heterogeneity, node capability, network structure, and sensitivity to framing on multiple semi-synthetic datasets.
AISAC: An Integrated multi-agent System for Transparent, Retrieval-Grounded Scientific Assistance
Bhattacharya, Chandrachur, Som, Sibendu
AI Scientific Assistant Core (AISAC) is an integrated multi-agent system developed at Argonne National Laboratory for scientific and engineering workflows. AISAC builds on established technologies - LangGraph for orchestration, FAISS for vector search, and SQLite for persistence - and integrates them into a unified system prototype focused on transparency, provenance tracking, and scientific adaptability. The system implements a Router-Planner-Coordinator workflow and an optional Evaluator role, using prompt-engineered agents coordinated via LangGraph's StateGraph and supported by helper agents such as a Researcher. Each role is defined through custom system prompts that enforce structured JSON outputs. A hybrid memory approach (FAISS + SQLite) enables both semantic retrieval and structured conversation history. An incremental indexing strategy based on file hashing minimizes redundant re-embedding when scientific corpora evolve. A configuration-driven project bootstrap layer allows research teams to customize tools, prompts, and data sources without modifying core code. All agent decisions, tool invocations, and retrievals are logged and visualized through a custom Gradio interface, providing step-by-step transparency for each reasoning episode. The authors have applied AISAC to multiple research areas at Argonne, including specialized deployments for waste-to-products research and energy process safety, as well as general-purpose scientific assistance, demonstrating its cross-domain applicability.
FACA: Fair and Agile Multi-Robot Collision Avoidance in Constrained Environments with Dynamic Priorities
Singh, Jaskirat, Chandra, Rohan
Multi-robot systems are increasingly being used for critical applications such as rescuing injured people, delivering food and medicines, and monitoring key areas. These applications usually involve navigating at high speeds through constrained spaces such as small gaps. Navigating such constrained spaces becomes particularly challenging when the space is crowded with multiple heterogeneous agents all of which have urgent priorities. What makes the problem even harder is that during an active response situation, roles and priorities can quickly change on a dime without informing the other agents. In order to complete missions in such environments, robots must not only be safe, but also agile, able to dodge and change course at a moment's notice. In this paper, we propose FACA, a fair and agile collision avoidance approach where robots coordinate their tasks by talking to each other via natural language (just as people do). In FACA, robots balance safety with agility via a novel artificial potential field algorithm that creates an automatic ``roundabout'' effect whenever a conflict arises. Our experiments show that FACA achieves a improvement in efficiency, completing missions more than 3.5X faster than baselines with a time reduction of over 70% while maintaining robust safety margins.
Artificial Intelligence Agents in Music Analysis: An Integrative Perspective Based on Two Use Cases
Martรญnez-Heredia, Antonio Manuel, Rodrรญguez, Dolores Godrid, Garcรญa, Andrรฉs Ortiz
Despite considerable technological innovation, comprehensive reviews synthesizing the application and evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) in the field of music analysis remain scarce. Although early studies on computer-assisted composition and rule-based analysis established a foundation for the automated exploration of musical form and content Hiller (1959), there is still a limited body of literature addressing the complete progression from traditional algorithms to recent AI-driven models and hybrid systems. Pioneering work such as Miranda's Miranda (2021), underscores the influence of AI, supercomputing, and evolutionary computation in shaping the first computational tools for creation. Recent reviews (Wang et al. (2024); Lerch et al. (2025)) focus on intelligent music generation systems. However, a systematic integration of these historical advances with state-of-the-art AI methodologies and musical analysis is largely absent. In the last decade, deep learning frameworks--including convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, and transformer architectures--have led to breakthroughs in music information retrieval.
Randomized Controlled Trials for Conditional Access Optimization Agent
Bono, James, Cheng, Beibei, Lozano, Joaquin
AI agents are increasingly deployed to automate complex enterprise workflows, yet evidence of their effectiveness in identity governance is limited. We report results from the first randomized controlled trial (RCT) evaluating an AI agent for Conditional Access (CA) policy management in Microsoft Entra. The agent assists with four high-value tasks: policy merging, Zero-Trust baseline gap detection, phased rollout planning, and user-policy alignment. In a production-grade environment, 162 identity administrators were randomly assigned to a control group (no agent) or treatment group (agent-assisted) and asked to perform these tasks. Agent access produced substantial gains: accuracy improved by 48% and task completion time decreased by 43% while holding accuracy constant. The largest benefits emerged on cognitively demanding tasks such as baseline gap detection. These findings demonstrate that purpose-built AI agents can significantly enhance both speed and accuracy in identity administration.
Exploring Transferability of Self-Supervised Learning by Task Conflict Calibration
Guo, Huijie, Wang, Jingyao, Guo, Peizheng, Shen, Xingchen, Zheng, Changwen, Qiang, Wenwen
In this paper, we explore the transferability of SSL by addressing two central questions: (i) what is the representation transferability of SSL, and (ii) how can we effectively model this transferability? Transferability is defined as the ability of a representation learned from one task to support the objective of another. Inspired by the meta-learning paradigm, we construct multiple SSL tasks within each training batch to support explicitly modeling transferability. Based on empirical evidence and causal analysis, we find that although introducing task-level information improves transferability, it is still hindered by task conflict. To address this issue, we propose a Task Conflict Calibration (TC$^2$) method to alleviate the impact of task conflict. Specifically, it first splits batches to create multiple SSL tasks, infusing task-level information. Next, it uses a factor extraction network to produce causal generative factors for all tasks and a weight extraction network to assign dedicated weights to each sample, employing data reconstruction, orthogonality, and sparsity to ensure effectiveness. Finally, TC$^2$ calibrates sample representations during SSL training and integrates into the pipeline via a two-stage bi-level optimization framework to boost the transferability of learned representations. Experimental results on multiple downstream tasks demonstrate that our method consistently improves the transferability of SSL models.